Tag: Kennerspiel des Jahres 2018 Nominee

The Quedlinburg Quacks are not the east German town’s hockey team. Neither are the Quacks of Quedlinburg a family of celebrity ducks living in the area. I would love if they were, though. No, The Quacks of Quedlinburg (original title: Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg, no official English title yet) is one of Wolfgang Warsch’s games on this year’s Spiel des Jahres shortlists. We already reviewed the others (Ganz Schön Clever and The Mind), so today we’ll talk about quacks and snake oil salesmen.

The players in Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg are charlatans selling their potions and tinctures at the annual fair in Quedlinburg. At least, they will sell them if they manage to make them without blowing up their kettle. Spoiler: they won’t. Not reliably. The possibility of your kettle exploding is the fun. And the best part: when it does explode you have no one to blame but yourself.

This is probably our shortest review ever. At least I can’t think of a game that would have an even shorter one. The Mind is one of Wolfgang Warsch’s games nominated in the Spiel des Jahres awards this year (the others being Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg and Ganz Schön Clever, both nominated for Kennerspiel). I hope you’ll enjoy our very brief video review!

This year, the third seal of the apocalypse has been broken: A roll-and-write game is nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres. Or was that the fourth seal? How did that happen? Has the world gone mad? Did the Yahtzee mafia threaten the jury? Take their children hostage?

It’s something much less sinister. I didn’t think it could happen, but Ganz schön clever might be a roll-and-write game that deserves to be on that list. There’s something about it that sets it apart from other games where you roll dice and write numbers on your score pad. In this game, the dice have different colors.

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The Plains of Triangles. Undiscovered land. With nothing but a cart full of milestones and a group of builders we set out to bring civilization to the uninhabitet land. We’re not really going anywhere, but we put the infrastructure in place for the people that come after us, that will settle the Plains of Triangles and will go somewhere.

Fields of Arle is Uwe Rosenberg’s love letter to the home of his ancestors, East Frisia and especially the village of Arle. It’s a worker placement game that is unusual in not allowing more than two players, but is equally unusual in the number of options you have and factors to consider. It’s a big game, a long game, and a game that brings many aspects of medieval Frisia to life.

Bruno Cathala and Days of Wonder take us to Naqala, a magical kingdom straight out of Arabian Nights if Arabian Nights had included meeples. Which it should have. Five Tribes is one of the most talked about games of the last year, and after testing it extensively we understand why.

This is the game you will never find on Google. Because the name of the game is The Game, and that’s just not very distinctive. The Game is a cooperative card game that was nominated for the 2015 Spiel des Jahres. It’s small and abstract, but that doesn’t say anything about how much fun it is.

In 1804, shortly after president Jefferson purchased half the North American continent from Napoleon, the Lewis and Clark expedition set out to survey just what the president had acquired. Or should that be “the Lewis and Clark expeditions”? As it turns out, up to five expeditions may have competed to get to the Pacific coast first, and only the first to arrive, cleverly recruiting expedition members and managing their resources, will be remembered by history.

Abstract strategy games for two players. There are many of them already, you could think that all the good ideas have been done. And then a game like Coerceo comes along, completely redefines how you use the board in a classic black-vs-white abstract game and is all fresh and exciting. You should never consider a genre complete, there are always great ideas still to be dicovered.

Mighty empires are fighting for supremacy over the ancient world. But where once up to seven empires where in contest, now there are only two. 7 Wonders: Duel condenses the action of 7 Wonders into a two player game, playing in two being the one weak spot 7 Wonders always had. To make that happen, many things had to change, but the game remains the same.